WASHINGTON  The emblematic Democratic presidential election, encoded in the party's DNA, was John Kennedy's 1960 campaign built around the pledge "to get this country moving again." The 1992 Bill Clinton version, with its internal slogan, "It's the economy, stupid," hammered home the same themes of governmental activism and vigor.

For the Republicans on domestic policy, the model for victory lies in replicating the comforting tones of Ronald Reagan's 1984 "It's morning in America" lullaby. After all, who in the GOP would want to tamper with a formula that produced a 49-state landslide?

What these trademark Democrat and Republican campaigns represent are the two sides of the economic issue in politics. The Democrats, whose outlook has been shaped by the Great Depression and subsequent recessions, are the party used to decrying a half-empty glass. The Republicans, in contrast, will point to the same glass and defiantly insist that it is nearly overflowing with economic bounty.

When the current presidential campaign began back in mid-2002, most of the Democrats fantasizing about the Oval Office assumed that the economic doldrums would continue all through George W. Bush's term. A high unemployment rate and accompanying hardship are not what the Democrats wish for the country, but they do know that such adverse conditions would improve the party's prospects for winning back the White House in 2004.

Howard Dean said as much back in September 2002. During a lengthy interview, when he was a long-shot prospect at best for the nomination, Dean spoke candidly about the connection between his assumptions about the economy and his decision to seek the presidency. "Here's my whole theory about this, which will be interesting to see how it plays out a year from now," Dean said. "I don't think a Democrat can win the presidency in 2004 if the economy is good. As much as I hope the economy is good for the country's sake, I'm going to make the assumption that it won't be good. Because otherwise, why would you do this?"

Looking back on Dean's comments a little more than a year later, it is hard to give the former Vermont governor high marks as an economic seer. Yes, the unemployment rate is still troublingly high at 6% (the November number will be released today), the budget deficit remains a veritable Red Sea and the dollar hit a historic low Wednesday against the euro. But well before the election, most other signs point to a strong, and potentially stirring, uptick in the economy. Front-page headlines, such as this one from Thursday's USA TODAY, "Worker output rises at 9.4% clip," gladden Republican campaign consultants and prompt their Democratic counterparts to contemplate alternative strategies.

Yes, political prognostication and economic forecasting share the same occupational hazard of over-extrapolating from a few months of data. But if current conditions were somehow to continue until next November, we would have a trading-places election in which the Republicans were gloating over the economy and the Democrats were stressing their mastery of foreign policy.

Candidates such as Dean can rightly claim that Bush is on pace to become the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a net loss of jobs. Gene Sperling, the former Clinton economic adviser, can argue in a column for Bloomberg News this week that the first tentative signs of an economic recovery should not be hailed as "an immediate slam-dunk validation" of the president's policies. But for all the Democratic efforts to influence the public's sense of the direction of economy, it is certainly looking like a rosy political scenario for the president.

Part of the Democrats' political problem is that the most obvious manifestations of a still-troubled economy do not appear to resonate with the voters. It almost seems a lifetime ago that Bush and Al Gore were debating in 2000 over what to do with the projected $5 trillion budget surplus for this decade. Now we're returned to an era of record-setting deficits and no one, aside from a few stubborn green-eyeshade types, seems to care. During the recent high-decibel congressional debate over the prescription drug benefit for Medicare recipients, Republicans and Democrats were united on only one point: the nation can afford to go further into debt to pay for this new entitlement for the elderly.

Even Clinton, who briefly turned the Democrats into the party of fiscal responsibility, has begun to wonder in hindsight whether it was a fight worth waging. Recently, the former president privately told friends, "Maybe I shouldn't have focused on the deficit. People don't seem to care."

The difficulty is that a balanced budget or, for that matter, a deficit of $400 billion remains an abstraction to most Americans. No one has ever excitedly phoned home to exclaim, "Guess what, I just got a great job because the government is spending no more than it's taking in."

Similarly, few American vacationers visiting Rome this Christmas season will make the connection between how expensive a simple meal in a trattoria seems and the way that hemorrhaging budget deficits have contributed to the weakness of the dollar's buying power.

But wherever the leading indicators head in the coming months, the economic arguments from both parties are likely to be more localized than in prior presidential elections.

The combination of a limited number of battleground states, vast amounts of campaign cash and the ability to achieve narrow-casting through cable TV and the Internet means that national trends may prove less important than the economic mood in each pivotal neighborhood.

What we may have is an election where the Republicans proclaim it's morning in Tampa while the Democrats promise to get Sandusky, Ohio, moving again.